Northern Ontario has long been accustomed to the roller coaster effect in place when it comes to attention from Queen’s Park and Ottawa. While an election is underway candidates promise faithfully to change the paradigm and focus more attention on the needs of the North, needs that in many instances have long surpassed the bar set for determining that need has reached crisis levels. But when governing, competing interests and the rising populations in southern regions of the province dull the earlier enthusiasm.
Plain and simple, there are more votes and seats to be had in the south; more fundraising opportunities and a deeper well of potential political contributions from which to draw. It’s just plain mathematics and any politician espousing different is voicing an expedient creed.
This mathematical reality is largely the result of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Northern population numbers facilitate ignoring the North when it comes to designing policies, ignoring the North exacerbates population declines, those decline encourage further inattention—wash, rinse, repeat.
The nation is currently experiencing a long-anticipated decline in working population. For nigh onto 30 years various consultants and economic pundits have sounded the alarm when it comes to the impact retiring boomers have on the economy. Those impacts were ameliorated, slightly, with the removal of mandatory retirement—allowing those sitting at the top of the employment food chain to remain in place far longer than in previous generations. The new cry? Freedom 75 baby!
But the pandemic readjusted the workforce paradigm yet again, and many boomers decided staying at their desks was no longer worth the powder, providing something of a double whammy to a recovering market and the economy overall. Labour shortages equate to supply chain challenges and drops in productivity—can you say inflation? Inflation is when demand outstrips supply.
There are those who will claim, for ideological reasons or out of just plain habit, that the problem is that nobody wants to work anymore. They will cite long gone pandemic subsidies as the cause. In a word—nonsense. Those who did not want to work before COVID still don’t want to work; they were never part of the equation. Those subsidies are long, long gone.
The solution to the problem has been pegged at increasing immigration, while at the same time enhancing subsidies to companies mechanizing their production lines to improve overall productivity.
Productivity has long been a low-hanging fruit for Canadian business, which has been largely shielded from the need to enhance per/worker output by lower wages than those of our cousins to the south (forget minimum wage and compare comparable skilled workforce stipends). We can make great gains here, but the bulk will be in the south where most of the manufacturing is located.
When it comes to immigration Canada is taking the bull by the horns and tail, upping quotas dramatically to rates unseen since the great westward expansion. But again, most of those new Canadians will choose to settle in large urban regions in the south where they can find established communities of expatriates. Thankfully, the government has seen fit to implement a program that aims to encourage immigrants to settle in Northern regions.
Unfortunately, that program is limited to larger urban centres in the North, continuing the population drain from smaller rural regions such as those on Manitoulin Island. The Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot is a community-driven program. It’s designed to spread the benefits of economic immigration to smaller communities by creating a path to permanent residence for skilled foreign workers who want to work and live in one of the participating communities.
Those communities include both Sudbury and Sault Ste. Marie.
When it comes to inclusion and the regional provision of services, Sudbury is quite willing to embrace Manitoulin and its people into the calculations—but so far not Manitoulin when it comes to the Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot.
The Island has businesses that are desperate for workers, both skilled and otherwise—but we are locked out of that program which could help lessen some of the strain of a declining rural workforce. It is past time for that program to be expanded to include the “feeder” communities that surround the larger urban centres.
Of course, the workforce issue is many-faceted and rural Northern communities, like urban centres across the province, are also in desperate need of affordable housing in which to put those workers. Programs to encourage and enhance the housing stock need to keep small rural regions in their sights.
Without this double-barrel approach to solving the matter, Northern Ontario will continue to decline in population, at least relative to the south, and politicians, however well-meaning, will continue to focus where the votes are.
